In food service and food handling industries, public health considerations have lead to rules mandating that workers wear gloves when handling food. Corresponding requirements also exist in other industries. In sandwich shops and similar establishments where workers successively serve a series of customers, it may be required in order to prevent cross-contamination that the workers don a new set of gloves for each customer. As a result, there is a need for inexpensive gloves which are readily disposable. Such gloves are commonly made from two layers of polymeric film cut to the general shape of a hand and heat sealed around the periphery to from an enclosure for the hand.
In many cases, however, such gloves can be difficult to apply. The thin polymeric films from which the gloves are made can be difficult to grip. Static charges or natural adhesion may cause the layers to adhere to each other, thereby making it difficult for a user to open the glove for insertion of the hand. Service delays which occur as workers struggle to put on a new set of disposable gloves reduce the overall efficiency of food service establishments. It would be highly desirable for such businesses if an apparatus were available to facilitate rapid and reliable donning of a new disposable glove by the personnel of the establishment.
Efforts have been made in the past to devise glove applying devices, particularly for surgical gloves. Such devices, however, have tended to be complicated and/or to involve complex structural arrangements, such as tight peripheral seals, unsuited to the dispensing of lightweight and inexpensive food service gloves. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,695,463 discloses a system in which an individual glove is inserted into a vacuum-generating machine, where each individual glove must be first handled and a seal between the wrist opening of the glove and the vacuum-generating machine must be created. The need to individually handle the gloves and to positively seal the wrist region of the glove to permit a strong vacuum to be generated (such as by clamping the wrist region of the glove on the vacuum-generating machine, rolling the wrist region over a rim of the vacuum-generating machine, or providing a rigid ring about the glove wrist area to support the glove when located in the vacuum-generating machine) is a problem common to a number of such designs, for example, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,002,276, 4,155,494, 4,889,266, 4,915,272, 5,058,785, 5,078,308, 5,868,290, 6,053,380, 6,435,388, 6,832,708 and 6,932,253.